Londinium
An armchair travel story from the Nomad Life collection
Please have seat here and warm up,” the Russian spa therapist told me.
I obeyed and entered a large sauna. There were three levels of deep steps you could choose to sit on. I wasn’t a sauna noob. I knew that the higher up you go, the hotter the air, so I plopped myself down on the middle stair and immediately started sweating from every pore on my body.
Shelby had given me this “Birch Treatment” at a Russian spa located in the affluent London neighborhood of Chelsea as my birthday present. I had no idea what to expect other than birch trees were likely to be involved.
At first, I was alone in the sauna, but a few minutes into my sit, when I was dripping sweat and could smell garlic from my dinner the night before emanating off my skin and into the sticky air, two women entered whispering to each other in Russian.
I glanced up and was surprised to see two girls who could have passed as supermodels. They were tall and slender, but while their bodies appeared natural in their spaghetti-string bikinis, their faces were covered with makeup and their lips were abnormally large. They lounged on the top step, using towels as pillows.
I rested my head in my hands, looking down at my beer belly hanging over the band of my swim trunks. The thermometer mounted on the unstained wooden wall read one-hundred and eighty degrees. Considering the fact that water boils at just over two-hundred degrees, and that I’m mostly made of water, I began to worry that maybe someone had accidentally over-heated the sauna. The Russian models didn’t seem concerned and their bodies were soon magestically glistening with sweat, so I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Surely my therapist would return soon to begin my relaxing spa treatment.
As the minutes passed by, a sweat puddle accumulated underneath my feet. I checked the tiny, rectangular window on the sauna door often, hoping I’d see my therapist approaching. I began to wonder if he’d forgotten me and almost had myself convinced that I should leave the sauna to look for him. The Russian models wrapped their hair in towels and left just as delicately as they entered. I was alone again.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the blurry outline of a tall Russian man marched toward the sauna. Earlier, when he had greeted me at the front desk upon arrival, he was wearing a gray uniform with a nametag and leather shoes, but now he was barefoot and wore only a pair of swim trunks and a towel slung over his head, which draped down his back.
“That’s the hottest sauna I’ve ever been in,” I confessed to him, wiping sweat from my brow.
He chuckled. “Just wait until the treatment.”
I’ll admit that at this point I was a little worried, but I reassured myself that I was at a high-end spa-this was a place built for relaxation.
He led me into a back room that contained the sauna’s furnace. I followed his instructions and laid facedown on a damp wooden plank. I was already pretty hot before the guy stoked the furnace and dumped a bucket of water over the top the glowing rocks. The temperature in the room quickly surpassed that of the sauna.
My therapist covered his bare skin in towels until his shadow in the dark room looked like a yeti or some forest monster. He dumped bucket after bucket of water onto the hot stones, dipped branches of birch into the boiling water, then beat my back repeatedly with them. After a few minutes of twigs and leaves singeing my skin, he left and told me to stay still so the birch oil could seep into my skin, which he informed me was a mild narcotic and might make me high.
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I’m not sure how long he was gone, but the next ten or so minutes were some of the most uncomfortable of my life. I felt like I was cooking alive. In the brief moments where I forgot about how pruned and hot my skin felt, my neck ached from laying facedown on a plank of wood with my head turned to the side.
I didn’t think the room could safely get any hotter, but when the therapist finally returned, he cranked the heat up even more, then had me turn onto my back. My neck muscles felt a little relief, but now it was my limbs’ turn to suffer. He alternated raising my hands and feet high above my body where the air was hotter. The first time he lifted my right hand up, my fingers instantly burned as if I’d dunked them into a pot of boiling water. I recoiled my arm into my chest, which he patronized me for.
“This is an important part of the treatment,” he told me, grabbing my wrist and yanking my hand back up into the air.
So I let him burn my fingers and toes, and after this sequence of torture was complete, he finally told me it I could leave. I was overjoyed. The suffering was over!
I felt dizzy from being so hot, so he held onto my arm and escorted me out of the room. Fresh air ran over my face as we exited, but it wasn’t enough to cool me off. My body felt like a blanched tomato ready to have it’s skin peeled off.
At first, we walked in the direction of the changing rooms and I thought the treatment was over, but at the last minute, my therapist veered us down a hall. He shoved me into a shower and blasted the top of my head with cold water. My body instantly went into shock. I opened my mouth wide, gasping for air, but none entered. Chills crawled down my neck. Some parts of my body still felt like they were cooking while others were frozen.
My therapist grabbed my arm again and led me back out into the common area. “I feel a bit like I’m going to pass out,” I told him.
“This is normal,” he said dismissively.
I started to get the feeling this guy thought I was a pussy, which pissed me off. His doubt helped me discover a new-found resolution and courage to prove him wrong. I wasn’t going to wimp out and quit after surviving the sauna, the human boil chamber, and the arctic shower.
At this point, I was in so deep, I would have done just about anything he told me so I could finish the treatment. Besides, the Russian models might be watching me from a therapeutic waterboarding room. This luxurious spa treatment wasn’t going to make a fool of me. If he told me to dance and squeal like a pig, I would have jumped in circles screaming, “Rheee!!!!”
He walked me over to an ice bath and said, “Get in and dunk yourself to the top of your head three times.”
I stoically stepped in and plunged myself below the surface, making sure to hold my head underwater for a few seconds each time to show him I wasn’t some little American bitch.
When I stepped out of the bath, my body was vibrating. It felt like electricity was running down my arms and fingers. I saw stars in my field of vision as I stumbled back into the common area. My therapist slung a towel over my head like NFL players do when they’re injured and are being carted off the field. He escorted me into a sitting room lined with bookshelves, where he sat me down in a leather reclining chair and brought me a pot of black tea accompanied by a literal gravy boat full of honey.
And that’s the story of how I joined the KGB…
This story continues at https://zackthoutt.com/writing/nomad-life/16-londinium
Originally published at https://zackthoutt.com.
